Everyone
knows that Russian exile Alexander Litvinenko was killed by radiation
poisoning in London last month. But beyond that bare fact, almost
nothing is clear about the case. The truth has disappeared,
probably forever, into the shadowlands – that murky confluence of
crime, violence, money and politics where so much of the real business
of the world is conducted. However, an examination of some of the
curiously overlooked aspects of the affair might send at least a few
shafts of light into the cloud of unknowing that has enveloped
Litvinenko's death.

Of
course, one of the chief obstacles in assessing the situation is the
fact that almost everything we knew about the case for weeks was
spoonfed to the media by the most elite PR operation in Britain. Almost
from the moment that Litvinenko fell ill, he disappeared behind a
phalanx of handlers paid for by his patron, Boris Berezovsky, the
fugitive Russian billionaire and shadowlands operator par excellence.
To handle – and generate – the publicity surrounding the incident,
Berezovsky called on his old friend, Baron Bell of Belgravia,
who, back when he was just plain old Tim Bell, served as the private
propaganda chief for Margaret Thatcher, as Sourcewatch reports. The
baron has also flacked for disgraced media mogul Conrad Black,
disgraceful media mogul Rupert Murdoch, and the Coalition Provisional
Authority, the mechanism set up by the Bush Administration to
eviscerate Iraq.

(Speaking
of the CPA, UK investigators now say they've found traces of Polonium
201, the radioactive isotope believed to have killed Litvinenko, in the
London offices of Erinys, a private security company. As I noted in CounterPunch back in December 2003,
Bush's CPA gave Erinys' Iraqi branch – formed as a joint venture with
business cronies and family members of bigtime shadowlander Ahmad
Chalabi – $40 million to guard oil pipelines in the conquered land.
This has grown into a much larger stashn, not to mention an armed force
of 16,000 men – something of a militia, one might say. The freebooters
also bagged big money riding shotgun for Halliburton and Bechtel in
those palmy CPA days of yore. And as the Guardian reports, Erinys is
also active in Russia. You pull at one string in the shadowlands, and a
whole tangled nest of other dark business starts shaking somewhere
else.)

The
leaping lord's PR shop has also represented Ukraine President Viktor
Yushchenko, another victim of a spectacularly ham-handed poisoning laid
at the Kremlin's door. Yet another client was former Russian President
Boris Yeltsin, whose "miraculous" 1996 election victory – in the face of single-digit approval ratings
– was engineered by a small group of oligarchs who were later given
carte blanche to plunder Russia's state-owned enterprises and vast
natural resources for private profit. The acknowledged leader of this
clique – which had muscled its way to riches and power in the brutal,
Hobbesian free-for-all that characterized the Yeltsin years – was of
course a certain Boris Berezovsky.

As
one of the prime vetters of political aspirants in the Yeltsin court,
Berezovsky was instrumental in bringing the obscure but presumably
biddable ex-KGB apparatchik Vladimir Putin to power. But Putin had a
clique of his own, based in the security organs – and soon the
oligarchs found themselves out-muscled, on the receiving end of the
state machinery they had manipulated for so long. Most fled abroad,
where they'd stashed their billions; some were jailed. Berezovsky,
charged with embezzlement and money laundering, repaired to sumptuous
digs in London and environs, there to become Putin's most ferociously
outspoken critic. He also found new friends in high places – including
Neil Bush, George W.'s scandal-ridden brother. Berezovsky is one of the
backers of Neil's "educational software" company, which peddles a dumbed-down "interactive teaching" system called COW to public school systems loath to risk their federal funding by rejecting a First Family boondoggle.

This
then is the team that controlled the flow of information during the
three agonizing weeks it took Litvinenko to die. They set out the basic
storyline that was followed, with scarcely a variation, by all the
leading UK papers and most of the world media. The Cold War had come
again, we were told: a bold dissident against the tyrannical Putin
regime had been assassinated in the streets of London by the undead
KGB, wielding strange poisons concocted in secret laboratories. (All
this while the latest James Bond movie was having its gala premiere!) A
carefully composed photograph of the martyr was released by the
baronial PR outfit, and quickly became the global emblem of the case.
This is what Putin has done, Litvinenko was said to have said: see his
evil handiwork with your own eyes.

The
human tragedy of the victim's painful deterioration was genuine: a man
cut down in his prime, leaving behind a grieving wife, an orphaned son,
a weeping father. As a PR move, it was even more effective: the
disturbing images, coupled with the drumbeat of accusations against
Putin, obscured several essential questions, such as: Who was Alexander
Litvinenko? Why would the Kremlin risk a rupture with the West by
killing him in such an open, garish fashion? And who was the obscure
"Italian academic" he met with at that fatal sushi bar where, we were
told, he probably ingested, somehow, the radioactive hemlock?

(More after the jump.)

II. Wheels Within Wheels
In
the press, Litvinenko is invariably described as a "fierce critic of
Putin" or words to that effect, and as former officer in the FSB, one
of the post-Soviet successor agencies of the KGB. (Most of the media
stories skate over the fact that Litvinenko was also a military
counterintelligence officer in the old KGB as well.) He is said to have
fled Russia after refusing an alleged order to murder Berezovsky – who
promptly took him in, provided him with a house in London, and
bankrolled Litvinenko's book, which accused Putin of staging the 1999
Moscow apartment bombing that the Kremlin cited as justification for
its second savage war of destruction against Chechnya.

Litvinenko's deathbed j'accuse
against Putin – again, released by the Berezovsky phalanx – was heard
around the world, as we all know. But this was the first time that
Litvinenko's relentless barrage of charges against Putin had ever
attracted widespread attention – or an assumption of credibility. His
previous book had sunk without a trace; Berezovsky had in fact been
shopping around for someone to write another terrifying tome on the
subject, once asking Russian journalist Oleg Sultanov t o take it on
and make it "as scary as possible," as The Scotsman reports.
"Alex Goldfarb, Berezovsky's closest ally [and one of the chief
spokesmen during Litvinenko's illness], admitted the Litvinenko books
were a flop. So it [was] urgently necessary to create some hot new
reading material which would prove that 'our cause is just' and Putin
is the enemy of the human race," Sultanov told the paper.

Over
the years, Litvinenko had charged, among many other things, that the
Kremlin had trained al-Qaeda's top leaders prior to 9/11; that Putin
was behind last year's subway bombings in London; that the FSB was
responsible for the 2002 Moscow theater massacre and the horrific 2004
slaughter at the Beslan schoolhouse; and that Italian Prime Minister
Romano Prodi was a long-time KGB agent. This summer, when Putin was
filmed playfully smooching a small boy's belly, Litvinenko rushed out a
piece declaring that Putin was a paedophile
– a proven fact that he and other FSB officials had known for years, he
said, although he didn't explain why he had refrained from revealing
this damning information before.

None
of these charges had been taken seriously, or even noticed in the
media. Almost no one had ever heard of Litvinenko before the poisoning.
Unlike Anna Politkovskaya,
the muckraking, anti-Putin journalist murdered in Moscow in October,
Litvinenko did not have an international reputation based on years of
solid, credible work in the field. He was an ex-KGB agent who had fled
one quadrant of the shadowlands in the Kremlin for another quadrant
under Berezovsky's roof. The fact that he had accused Putin of
involvement in every major crime of the 21st century does not mean that
he was necessarily wrong in this last, fatal instance, of course. But
awareness of that fact would have given a different, more shaded
context to the dramatic deathbed charges. Yet Berezovsky and his baron
skillfully kept such mitigating data out of the public eye – and the
media were happy to seize on the simple, more sellable tale of the
dying champion of truth surrounded by simple, loving friends.

They were equally willing to ignore the curious connections of the last man who supposedly met with Litvinenko before the onset of his disease: Mario Scaramella (right), invariably described as
an "Italian academic" or "security expert" who had either given
Litvinenko documents revealing the Putin-backed murderers of
Politkovskaya, or else passed on the word from his contacts in Russian
intelligence that Litvinenko was marked for death, or in one account
purportedly by Litvinenko himself, produced some vague, non-urgent
emails about Politkovskaya then pointedly and nervously refused to eat
sushi with the Russian.

It was weeks before the Mail on Sunday sussed out the fact that Scaramella was in fact "a self-professed expert in nuclear materials"
– especially loose nukestuff floating around the ex-Soviet states – who
also had strong connections with both Russian and Italian intelligence
sources. The former tipped him off about attempts to smuggle nuclear
materials out of Russia and the east to terrorist and criminal gangs;
the latter allowed him to lead an armed police raid to snatch some
smugglers he'd fingered. What's more, Scaramella had also gone
commercial with his nuclear services, founding a company that offered
"environmental protection and security" against various biohazards –
services that some panicky Londoners might have paid good money for as
Polonium scares swept the capital after Litvinenko's death. Scaramella
also claimed academic associations with the universities of Stanford,
Naples and Greenwich – none of which had any record of his working for
them.

The
wheels within wheels grind on. On that same portentous day of sushi,
Litvinenko also met three Russians in a bar, including yet another
ex-KGB/FSB man: Andrei Lugovi, who had once been arrested for assisting
Berezovsky ally Nikolai Glushkov in an alleged escape attempt from
police custody, "where he was being held on charges of embezzlement (to
the tune of $250 million) and massive fraud," as Justin Raimondo notes in his exhaustive series on the case at
Antiwar.com. Lugovi was later released; Glushkov was tried and
convicted on lesser charges of financial chicanery related to the case
and served three years in prison. Last month, a Moscow court in Putin's
iron-handed tyrannical regime refused Kremlin requests to retry
Glushkov on the fraud charges, Novosti reports.

During
his FSB days, Lugovi also served as one of the bodyguards for Acting
Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar, during the latter's short but tumultuous
tenure guiding Russia's first post-Soviet government. Gaidar was a
"free-market" zealot and ardent Thatcherite who, under the guidance of
Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs, applied a chainsaw to Russia's social
and economic infrastructure: "shock therapy," it was called, and it
almost killed the patient. Millions lost their jobs, were driven out
into the streets to beg or sell off their possessions, millions fell
ill as the economy collapsed, multitudes died, and Russia began its
horrifying plunge in average lifespan – an unprecedented event for a
developed nation.

Now
Gaidar's family claim that he too has been poisoned by some mysterious
substance; he became violently ill during a trip to Dublin last week.
The Gaidar illness, with its tenuous link to Lugovi, is yet another
dark string in the increasingly tangled skein. Gaidar, by the way,
although nominally in the political opposition, also works occasionally
as an economic consultant for the Putin government.

Lugovi
meanwhile has apparently become a successful private detective and
"security consultant" in Moscow. In recent days, Berezovsky has begun
hinting heavily that his former friend Lugovi has been restored to the
good graces of the Russian security organs and thus might have had a
hand in Litvinenko's poisoning. How else to explain his booming
business? "Anyone close to me can normally not even find work in
Moscow, let alone have a successful business," Berezovsky told the
Moscow Times (again, noted by Raimondo). Yet Berezovsky himself has
maintained successful business interests in Moscow throughout his
bitter exile and denunciations of Putin. He only sold his controlling
interest in the top Russian newspaper, Kommersant, earlier this year –
and not because he was forced to sell by the media-controlling Kremlin
tyrant, but evidently because he wanted a quick cash infusion for other
enterprises, the Independent reports. (Maybe Neil Bush was about to
bounce a check.)

All
of this adds up to…well, nothing much in particular. It's the usual
murky ooze you find whenever an incident like the Litvinenko case turns
over a rock in the shadowlands: strange connections, mixed motives,
bluffs and double-bluffs, half-truths, black ops, lurid tales,
chancers, bagmen, spies, tycoon, mercenaries, war, murder, and money.
It's clear that almost every single player in the Litvinenko killing
could have had access to the sophisticated technical means necessary to
deliver Polonium 210 as an edible poison. It's not clear at all that
any of them had a compelling reason to do so.

To
be sure, Putin is a ruthless operator on behalf of what he perceives as
Russia's national interests, which he tends to identify with the power
and privilege of his own elitist clique, as do all our world statesmen
– none more so than his avowed soulmate, George W. Bush. And like Bush,
Putin has proven himself capable of wholesale slaughter and pinpoint
"extrajudicial killing" in the service of those interests. Some of his
critics have certainly ended up dead. Some of his supporters have too.
(And so have some of Berezovsky's critics, such as the American
journalist Paul Khlebnikov, whose book, "Godfather of the Kremlin"
blackened Berezovsky's name around the world far more successfully than
Litvinenko's ignored, forgotten tome ever did with Putin. Khlebnikov
was gunned down, Godfather-style, in Moscow in 2004.)

But
it beggars belief that a savvy operator like Putin would have
countenanced a plan to kill a small-fry critic in a such a
spectacularly public fashion, in the capital of a foreign country, with
a slow-acting radioactive isotope that guaranteed weeks of damaging
headlines and international outcry, putting at risk months of delicate
negotiations over Russia's expansion into the European energy market
and other lucrative deals. Someone who wanted to embarrass Putin, for
whatever reason, might have done it. (Matt Taibbi has an excellent article with
some of the more solid speculations on this point.) Someone with
motives entirely unconnected to Russian politics might have done it. Rogue elements of
this or that faction or agency or government might have done it. But
it's clear from all the facts available that the one person who would
benefit least from the murder is the one who has been most widely and
confidently accused of ordering it: Putin.

And
so the question of who killed Alexander Litvinenko remains an
impenetrable mystery. But at least it has thrown a flickering light on
the borders of the shadowlands, a pale fire in which we can dimly
perceive the ugly machinations, the violence and deceit, the crime and
corruption that lie beneath the gilded images of the movers and shakers
of the world.